Chapter
twelve
I bombed west on Thanatos, cruising along one of the elevated highways, the lights blurring past me, the cooling evening air glorious after the pummeling heat of the sentō. It took me less than a half hour to reach JR Shin ōkubo Station, where I parked and started strolling east, along ōkubo-dōri, the main thoroughfare. Once away from the blinding lights and giddy electronic music of the pachinko parlors surrounding the station, it didn’t just feel like I was in a different section of Tokyo—it felt like I was in a different city entirely. The buildings lining the street were ramshackle, with an insane variety of tiny storefront restaurants serving bolgogi and ogokbap and every kind of kimchi, all of it advertised by laminated photographs with Korean and Japanese captions and by hawkers calling out in a mix of both languages to passersby from the sidewalk. The street itself felt narrow relative to the density of stores and restaurants, offering only one lane in each direction, and the crowded sidewalks would have been dim if there hadn’t been so much indirect light spilling out of the densely clustered shops. There were karaoke joints and massage parlors; counterfeit handbag and perfume purveyors; all-night discount stores selling everything imaginable and all for under a hundred yen. I passed through air pockets perfumed by grilled meat, spiced vegetables, sweet pastries; tobacco and beer and sweat. But the kind of person I was looking for wouldn’t have a shop on the main street. The rents would be too high there, and his trade wouldn’t require the shōtengai foot traffic. His customers would know where he was located, and they would come to him.
A kilometer or so from the station, the crowds began to thin. As packed restaurants gave way to shuttered shops, the sidewalks grew dimmer; the streets, quieter; the atmosphere, for my purposes, more promising.
I turned onto a narrow street lit only by a stand of vending machines. The buildings on either side were mostly of wood, dried and darkened by decades of heat and humidity, their corrugated awnings jagged and torn, exposed bolts bleeding rust. A mad profusion of wires and pipes clung to the facades like the tentacles of some exotic alien parasite, garbage piled in plastic bags beneath the tangled tapestry. All the stores seemed closed. But there were a few dim lights glowing amid the overall gloom ahead, and I moved toward them.
The first place I reached was a tiny bar, filled with eight laughing customers. The second was a Korean noodle place, similarly small, similarly filled. The third was a shop advertising itself in Japanese—and presumably also in Korean, which I couldn’t read—as Spaaki, which in English would be Sparky. I thought perhaps this was a play on the English phrase spare key, and indeed the large image of a key on the bottom of the sign suggested I might have found the place I was looking for.
There was an old, emaciated man sitting at a table inside, a desk light on a swivel arm shining down before him and casting his face in shadow. His tee shirt sagged, and the white headband knotted around his temples and thick glasses perched on his nose made his head look too large for his body. A smoldering cigarette stub dangled from his lips like a growth. Several cooking knives were assembled in a row in front of him, and he was honing one of them with long, precise strokes across a grinding stone. There were clusters of electronics piled up all around—toasters, fans, a vacuum cleaner. This looked like my guy—a benriya, more recently known as a nandemoya, literally a “Mr. Anything,” a local jack-of-all-trades who residents could come to with any household thing they needed help with.
I knocked on the glass. The man looked up from the knife he was sharpening and squinted. “Closed,” he said, in Korean-accented Japanese, around his cigarette. “Come back tomorrow.”
The man was obviously zainichi, as I had hoped. Ethnic Korean, marooned in Japan after the Korean War, welcome in neither country, and belonging to neither. Beholden to neither.
“I can’t wait until tomorrow,” I said, pulling a ten-thousand-yen note from my wallet and pressing it up against the glass. “Are you sure you can’t help me now?”
He looked at me over the tops of his spectacles for a moment, then set down the knife he was working on and stubbed out the cigarette. He didn’t look dangerous, but still I was glad he had laid down the weapon. It implied a certain baseline trust without which there wasn’t much hope he’d be willing to help me.
He walked over and stopped on the other side of the door. “What’s the emergency?”
“I need to learn how locks work.”
He squinted. “You’re locked out?”
“No. I just want to learn.”
The squint deepened. “You want to be an apprentice? I don’t need one.”
“Not an apprentice. I want you to teach me.”
“You sure you’re not just locked out? It would be faster for me to let you in than to teach you to do it yourself.”
“I told you, I’m not locked out. I don’t know anything about locks. I want to learn. I’ll pay you.”
He looked at the ten-thousand-yen note, an encouraging hint of greed in his eyes. “Sure, I could teach you. But I’m not cheap, you know.”
I realized I should have held up a smaller bill. But too late now.
“All right, teach me.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“No. Now.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Do I seem crazy?”
He grunted. “Crazy people don’t always seem crazy.”
I realized I had no answer for that. Instead of even trying, I knelt and slid the bill under the door. I stood. “I want to start learning now.”
He stooped to retrieve the note, then straightened, silently examining it for a moment. He pulled a rag from his pocket and blew his nose so loudly the building practically shook. Then he cleared his throat, put the bill and the rag back in his pocket, glanced behind me, and, doubtless against his better judgment, opened the door.
“Is it all right if I come in?” I asked, not wanting to alarm him by entering too suddenly or without his explicit permission.
He squinted, which I guessed was his default expression for incomprehension. “How am I going to teach you if you stand out there?”
Fair point. I stepped inside and he locked the door behind me. Then without another word, he cleared the knives he had been sharpening and began pulling a variety of detached door locks from various drawers and shelves, placing each on the table in a row before retrieving yet another.
“How’d you know it was door locks?” I said.
He glanced at me. “Are you a bicycle thief?”
“No.”
“Car thief?”
“No.”
“Safe cracker?”
“No.”
“Then it’s door locks.”
The guy was shrewder than he looked. I realized I had given too much credence to the scrawny body and the obvious age, and had underestimated him. Watching him set up what would be our makeshift classroom, I wondered whether there would be some value to that. Getting people to underestimate you. Not letting them see what was under the hood. Preventing them from seeing it coming. I thought of the Japanese expression Nō aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu. The hawk with talent hides its talons. It had always been just that for me, an expression. But for the first time, I felt an inkling of what it might really imply.
He finished assembling what he was going to use for the lesson and blew his nose again. My ears rang from it and I hoped it wasn’t a habit of his. Though I sensed it was.
“I don’t have another chair,” he said, shoving the rag back into his pocket. “Why don’t you sit?”
“No, no, that’s fine. I’m happy to stand. You go ahead.”
He nodded and sat on the other side of the table. I realized a second late that he knew I was going to demur, but this way he got credit for being courteous and the more tangible benefit of the use of the chair, too. I was beginning to think he was a clever old bastard. Which didn’t bother me a bit. I certainly didn’t want a fool for a teacher.
“We’ll start with the basics,” he said, pulling out a set of lock-picking tools from a drawer and adjusting the swivel light to his satisfaction. “The most common type of door lock is a pin tumbler. All the locks on this table are examples.”
I looked at the locks he had assembled. “How long will it take?”
He set one of the locks in a vise. “To understand the mechanism? Five minutes. To learn to pick a pin tumbler lock slowly, in good conditions? An hour. To learn to open different locks fast, with different tools, in different circumstances? A long time. When you can open a lock in the dark and wearing gloves, you’ll know you’re good.”
“Why would I ever want to do something like that?”
The guy laughed. He knew exactly why I might want to do something like that. But luckily, he didn’t care.
I looked around the shop, suddenly fascinated. “How’d you learn how to do this? Locks, I mean. And fixing things.”
He looked at me, perhaps pleased that I was seeing something more than just the facade. “I hold things in my hands,” he said. “I ask them how they work, and I listen to what they say. And then I take them apart, and put them back together. I’ve been doing it since I was a little boy.”
I looked at him, trying to imagine him as a little boy. Yes, I thought I almost could. It was like suddenly seeing him…more completely. Three dimensions instead of just two.
“Can anyone do it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Not many people do. They’d rather come to me. No one has ever asked me to teach him before.”
The comment made me feel strange. Sad for the old man, but also mildly awed. A lifetime of learning, and he was about to share it with me for only ten thousand yen. That just a moment earlier I’d been irritated at myself for not driving a harder bargain made me feel vaguely ashamed.
The time went by quickly. Sometimes he would offer a suggestion—slow it down, easy on the torsion wrench, start with a different pin—but for the most part he watched me in silence, apart from periodic ear-splitting nose blows. At the end of an hour, I was reliably, if somewhat slowly, opening the various locks he had set out in front of me. It actually wasn’t that hard—mostly a question of understanding the mechanism, and of patience and deliberation. After I had defeated each of the locks twice, he nodded. “You have a good touch,” he said. “I think if you practice, you can understand the way things work.”
I resolved that I would. And not just locks. Other things. Everything. As he said, it was just a question of practice. And mindfulness, of course.
I bowed, long and low to show my respect, then straightened. “I have a good teacher,” I said. In Japan, complimenting a teacher would be considered rude—where would the student get the idea that he’s in a position to opine on the quality of his superiors?—but it felt like the right thing to say to someone who’d never been a teacher before. And besides, he wasn’t Japanese.
He returned the bow. “There’s not much more I can teach you. About pin tumbler locks, anyway.”
I smiled, taking this to mean it was either time for me to go, or to pay more money. “If I come back sometime, will you teach me other kinds of locks?”
He squinted and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s difficult, being so busy.”
Busy? I thought. It looked to me like he didn’t have anything more to do than sit here all day, tinkering with the appliances people brought him to fix and the knives to sharpen, maybe periodically rousing himself to let into a house someone who’d forgotten a key.
Then I realized. He was just haggling. It was the way this particular thing worked.
“Really?” I said. “Even on the same terms? Ten thousand yen an hour?”
He blew out a long breath as though he was about to make the most difficult concession in the history of negotiating. And maybe he was—because he must have known he could milk me for more than that. But he didn’t. Instead, he just said, “Well, I suppose I could make some time. You’re a good student.”
I stood to go. “Oh, one more thing. Can I buy a set of those lock picks from you? To practice with.”
He squinted. “You’re not a licensed locksmith. It would be illegal.”
I wondered what he would produce if I asked to see his license. But I realized that by “illegal,” he merely meant, “expensive.”
“How about another ten thousand yen?” I said.
He rubbed the back of his neck again and looked pained.
“Twenty thousand?” I said.
The old guy must really have taken a shine to me, because he didn’t squeeze me for more than that. I thanked him sincerely for his time and expertise, and told him I would see him again. Then, armed and dangerous with my new skills and new tools, I made my way back to Thanatos. It had been a long and eventful day, and I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep at the hotel in Uguisudani. And to seeing the girl, of course. It would be the third time we met, so hopefully she would finally tell me her name.